I began over a year ago chatting to a guy online. We chatted for a while, he chatted to my family, my sister, he seemed like a nice guy. Boy was I wrong! Recently he asked me to deposit some checks and send him some money. They were coming from the USA and I was to wire him money via Western Union. Stupid nieve me fell for this and deposited the checks into my account and wired him money.

The bank has a 20 day hold policy yet they released some money to me without verifying the funds. They questioned the checks but didn't call to check on the funds. THis I don't get, but anyway. I once deposited a $300 check from my parents and they called their bank to verify their funds but didn't call to verify $15,000 USD. Something wrong there.

Well after I wired two lots of money to him he bagan asking me for more. I told him I didn't have any. This was not a lie, I don't have any. I have been off work for over a year and I am up to my eyeballs in debt. I think deep down this looked good because I was "supposedly" getting money and I was so far behind. I learned though.

After I stopped sending him money he was all of a sudden very ill, in need of an operation. That is false as well.

I want to learn to bait him under a false alias and get back at him for what he did to me.

I'm sorry to hear about you loosing your money as well as finding out this person whom you thought was a friend turned out to be a thief, using you for his own purposes. I know it's of little comfort but this is a very common type of fraud which a lot of people fall for so don't feel as if you've somehow did something wrong.

What is the bank saying about this? I know that if they have lost money they sometimes can try to get it back from the person who presented the false cheque. If you haven't already done so I would urge you to sort things out with the bank and file a complaint with your local police. This will not get you any money back but may save you the hassle of the bank trying to recover the stolen money from you.

As to baiting him, this is not a forum for baiting but more for giving support to baiters. I know you are registered at 419 Eater. If you would like to PM me there, we could discuss the possibilities of baiting him.

It might not wise to bait this particular lad if you've lost money as you may find it very emotional, which may not be a good thing to put yourself through. You might therefore want another baiter to bait him for you and be updated on it.

Please discuss it with the bank as soon as possible. Make them aware that you were a victim of fraud and ask them to check with the police for verification. The last thing you need right now is the bank hassling you for the return of the money.

Well, of course they do. As far as I can see, the bank is only liable if you asked them to verify that the checks were good, and they said they were. If they didn't do anything wrong, then they will do the very best they can to make sure that someone else pays the cost. The bank is NOT your friend.

If you want to bait a scammer, www.419eater.com is the place to go for help and advice. But I'll tell you now, the first piece of advice you will get there is BAIT SAFE. That means NEVER bait a scammer who knows your real identity.

You *may* be able to anonymously latch on to the same scammer under a new ID, but probably not. You were probably the only person he was scamming with the ID he was using. So he'll know immediately that some 'new' person contacting him using that ID will be you.

You will not get your money back. Scammers NEVER give out any money. Remember that scamming is a crime, even if the target is a scammer. So do not be tempted to try to scam the money back out of him. You may end up adding a criminal conviction for fraud to your problems.

Do not fall for any "We will recover your lost money" emails either. They are scams, often run by the same person who stole your money in the first place.

Unfortunately the ways the law is in most countries the banks generally cannot be held liable even if they have verfied the cheque/money order as being legitiment. This means they are often sloppy when they come to advising customers on such matters.

I personally beleive that the liabilty should remain with the banks in these circumstances because they should never be making money available which isn't there. However it doesn't work like this, so we just have to accept that the bank is going to get the money back one way or another.

I appreciate that this is not going to be of much consolation, so for that I apologise in advance.

However, through my links to the major banks in the UK, I can confirm that cheques have rapidly become a thing of the past, and the banks would like nothing better than to see the back of cheque usage. It is an expensive system for them to maintain, and as previously mentioned, although not strictly liable, their reputation and profile suffers greatly when these occurrences are paraded as adverse news stories in the press. In this age of commercial enterprise and competition, this can be extremely damaging in terms of huge loss of profits. The same thing applies to money orders et al; anything international that is paper based can take a very long time to verify and authenticate purely due to the handling involved, and again it is something that the banks would like to eventually eliminate.

All without exception now prefer the use of electronic transfer, since confirmation of such funds is made very quickly and reliably; virtually all banks have an anti-fraud alert system whereby if funds are drawn on an account that seems out of the ordinary, the account holder is immediately notified and in fact, in many cases, the transfer itself is held up (and the account frozen) until the customer can confirm the transaction. In addition, of course, is the audit trail for such transactions.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that anything involving paper-based methods of payment is, at best, unreliable, and such suggestions from strangers or even short-term acquaintances should be avoided if at all possible.